For Your SDN Reading Pleasure . . .

During a Packet Pushers debate this week about the ongoing relevance of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) involving the formidable Greg Ferro of EtherealMind.com and the lively Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad on Twitter) of Juniper Networks, a question arose as to whether software defined networking (SDN) and MPLS were compatible.

It was then that I remembered a paper presented at HotSDN (SIGCOMM 2012) in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this summer. That paper, Fabric: A Retrospective on Evolving SDN, was authored by Nicira’s Martin Casado and Teemu Koponen, as well as by Scott Shenker (of both Nicira and UC Berkeley) and Amin Tootoochian of the University of Toronto. The paper essentially proposes that “SDN’s shortcomings . . . can be overcome by adopting the insights underlying MPLS.” It’s a great read, and I’ve written about it previously.

What I haven’t written about are some of the other great papers that were presented at HotSDN. Well, I am atoning for that omission now. If you have time on your hands this weekend — or at any other time — and you have an interest in what ingenious minds are devising for SDN, I invite you to browse through the variety of papers available at the HotSDN website. You’ll find content on SDN controller and switch design, programming and debugging, support for network services, and wireless and security. On Twitter, I’ve already touted “Kandoo: A Framework for Efficient and Scalable Offloading of Control Applications,” but there are others well worth perusing.

What strikes me about these papers is how assiduously and quickly the SDN community is closing gaps and shortcomings in the technology. Technologically, SDN is moving at a brisk pace.